Nate Silver looks back at the mid-2010s when publishers chased Facebook’s News Feed algorithm with clickbait headlines and low-quality traffic. He recalls how FiveThirtyEight under Disney/ESPN in 2014 focused on monthly unique visitors, only to find Facebook constantly shifting its algorithm and exaggerating video metrics. Viral spikes didn’t help: visitors skimmed a paragraph or two, then bounced. Facebook’s model pitted itself against publishers, treating them like a refueling stop before readers escaped back into the open web. Silver contrasts that with Twitter’s earlier days, when it rewarded expertise, newsworthiness and a nerdy snark. He points out that Twitter then drove more meaningful engagement for FiveThirtyEight, despite smaller user numbers. Over time, though, Twitter grew more partisan, dominated by dunks, pile-ons and rigid groupthink. Silver remembers becoming a “trending topic” far more often than he wanted—another signal that the platform had shifted away from reasoned debate. By the time he launched Silver Bulletin on Substack, social media had become nearly irrelevant to his audience growth. Substack’s internal data show that social referrals accounted for just 0.7 percent of views in March, even as overall readership jumped 40 percent year over year. He notes caveats—dark social, Substack Notes traffic, and the higher subscription conversion rates from social shares—but insists that platforms like Facebook and Twitter now play a minor role in his strategy. Finally, Silver highlights recent third-party data showing a 50-plus percent decline in search traffic for “Twitter/X” since its late-2012 peak. Even the remaining engagement skews heavily toward partisan, low-quality accounts. He implies that today’s social-media environment rewards outrage and spectacle over analysis—another reason for publishers to focus elsewhere.